also, yesterday, senators carl levin john mccain of for their ideas for bypassing the bill buster to -- it would change the senate rules to assemble a majority vote. they spoke for about half an hour. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2012] ok, sorry for the delay. we thought we had a vote, but there was no vote. senator mccain and i are part of a group of eight senators who have been working for about a month to come up with a proposal for our leaders and our conferences, which will hopefully overcome the gridlock that has so permeated the u.s. senate. the eight senators who have participated in this effort are myself, senator mccain, senator schumer, senator alexander, senator cardin, senator kyl, senator prior, and senator barasso. it is a bipartisan proposal, and we believe strongly we must reform the senate's procedures if it is going to do business more efficiently and fairly. there are many parts to our proposal, i would say the key number-one part is to give the majority leader options to overcome the fi